Articles from Vol. 60, No. 2, Summer

Laurie Cox, founder of the Australian Society for General Semantics, has received the 2003 Talbot Winchell Award. This award is given annually by the Institute of General Semantics to persons who have significantly furthered the spread of general semantics....

MANY WHO HAW STUDIED American drug policy believe our nation's drug laws have been ineffective and that changes should be made. For example, we could shift the current stress on law enforcement to more prevention and treatment, allow judges greater...

ALMOST THREE HUNDRED years ago, Swirl satirically suggested using poor Irish children as food--his A Modest Proposal aroused a public outcry of indignation and disgust. History has shown that many people take more offense at the words we use to describe...

In order to maintain entity, organisms of all kinds build walls or barriers around themselves to shut out too great impingement of externality. We are all familiar with the obvious physical barriers. The oyster has carried the business of physical...

I HAPPEN TO HAVE had an American father who lived essentially all his life in the United States and a French mother who came to the U.S. two months shy of turning twenty-one. They married a little over a year later and went on to have three children,...

CONSIDER wind, water, and fire. We can assign a multiplicity of uses to any one of these. We can use air for inflating rubber rafts, spraying paint, cooling and heating buildings, or for jackhammering tough concrete into small pieces. Humans have also...

The recipient of your smile glares back. You've caused offense and don't know why. How do you avoid another gaffe? Different cultures have widely different assumptions about the minutiae of everyday behavior, observes Edward MacNeal, whose insights...

Dear Editor: In light of the Spring issue's article on autism, I should let you know that I have an autism-related condition called Asperger's syndrome (as does my husband). We recently gave a joint presentation on Asperger's at a large local...

"I'M SORRY. Excuse me. Please forgive me. I beg your pardon. I apologize. What do we mean when we say we're sorry? It would seem that we can mean anything from remedial expressions of regret to sarcastic intimations of blame. In our analysis, we...

Laurie Cox, recipient of the 2003 Talbot Winchell Award for furthering general semantics, is a remarkable humanitarian who began using general semantics to help resolve his own "'psychological'" problems, and later became a dedicated general semantics...

A true scientist doesn't believe anything. He is the ultimate agnostic. He is all question and no answer. UNFORTUNATELY, a lot of people seem to think science is just another kind of magic. Or worse, they think that science is a kind of religion,...

Bob Kenyon, O. R. Bontrager, Dick Brenneman, Gwenn Hermann, Stanley Rittenoure, and Bucky Fuller THIS STUDENT-PRODUCED 'diary' provides a record of the 1950 Summer Seminar-Workshop conducted by the Institute of General Semantics. Held at The Barrington...

THE TEXTBOOKS our children use at school avoid bias, misrepresentation, and censorship--or so we might like to believe. Those who care about accurate description, and who assume textbook publishers care too, may read with alarm a new book that exposes...

IN APRIL, 2003, ten of the nation's biggest investment firms agreed to pay regulators $1.4 billion in fines. They were being prosecuted because they had "lured millions of investors to buy billions of dollars worth of shares in companies they knew...